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84 Letter to a Former Student Now Graduated There’s Rilke and then there’s all the horses’asses with their dubious advice. I think you know by now whom I most resemble, so let’s begin. The title of your e-mail to me this week,“Just a Little Nudge,”was alarming .What forgotten deadline for a scholarship letter had passed? What law school was impatiently awaiting my reference for you? I was relieved to read that you thought you needed the nudge: I’ve been dancing around the idea of trying to write a book for the last few years; I was noticeably unprepared for the task in your class, but I honed my schedule and workload [and have spent time thinking about] aesthetics, form, etc. I’ve got (what I consider to be) a great idea, I’ve built my outline, and I’ve got a hundred or so pages of notes. . . . But here I am . . . constantly unhappy with what I hear when I read back my work. Am I just not ready yet? Should I look to extend my education and hope that even more coursework will get me there? How is it that you write? Oh, that. I’m glad you didn’t ask about something slightly more difficult, like why the neutral B-meson shows a slight predilection for matter instead of antimatter,forcing our universe’s hand to a happy outcome on the matter of being and nothingness. Writing is easy, actually. Start with the fetishistic: Never trust your laptop,back up your files often,but if it’s served you well through years of constant heavy work, pat its case lightly each time you get up from your labors and say, “Good dog.” letter to a former student 85 Buy several multipacks of that one model of medium-blue ballpoint pen. Best to buy all you can lay hands on, because there’s no adequate replacement if the line is discontinued. Leave good spiral notebooks all over the house, one for each project. Be sure the covers are durable, that there are enough sheets,the weight of the paper sufficient,and spacing between lines generous. An astronaut pen in a pocket, always, with refills on hand for when the pressurized cartridges begin to leak, since they always will. A simple small digital recorder in a shirt pocket for car trips or walks. Also a small leather notebook—the kind with the replaceable pads and miniaturized pen that clasps the notebook shut—in a back pocket. Plan for times when you’ll have no pockets: swimming, pajama parties, ct scans, lovemaking . What will you do with your writing tools then? Next, use them to get everything down without regard for quality or usefulness. Sometimes that will mean stepping out of the shower, where so much thinking gets done, and dripping on the cat in order to catch an idea before it runs down the drain. Admire the mythic ruthlessness of Gabriel García Márquez, who it’s said turned his family’s car around on the way to vacation and drove straight home to write something down. Then he sold the car to pay for time to develop the idea, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Collect all notes from what my wife fondly calls the insanity journals and enter them into a Word document in emotional sequence, which is often not chronological. Begin to build each pointillist jot, in no particular order, and regardless of difficulty,until you see a good reason not to continue with one. Delete the unfit. Sort and rearrange the sequence, listening for connections and the chorale of sense. Have faith. Often it won’t be coherent until nearly the end. Cut redundancies. Continue to revise. Again. Again. And again. Yet again. A 500-word blog post, if it hopes to stay news, might need 4,000 words at the start and days of distillation. There are so many more aspects to the writing that can be seen, one-byone or together like a nest of pickup sticks, after long practice. But we still have to begin again each time,every visitation bringing new appreciation of the task. Image, for instance, isn’t just visual, it’s the idea-feeling that shortcircuits time and connects self to the world. The prose informs itself through variety, music, and rhythm. Sensitive performance also suggests the right words, therefore tone and meaning, in [18.118.200.197] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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